


undelete

by Chiomi



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Gen, Resurrection, Transhumanism, bioprinting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 13:58:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13009314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chiomi/pseuds/Chiomi
Summary: The Machine had lived in Root’s head for over a year, but had watched Reese closely for longer: she had models of both of them, built of observation and medical records that included CT scans and MRIs and multiple xrays for both. But the only reason she could do all that she did was that they had both bled for her. Copiously.It gave her the complete DNA and chemical profiles she needed for the bioprinters.





	undelete

**Author's Note:**

> I should be finishing rewrites of my term paper for my first semester of grad school. Or working. Or studying for statistics. But I wanted to have feelings instead, so I revisited this, spawned over the summer when I was listening to audiobooks about the way technology is going to fuck us up.

The Machine had lived in Root’s head for over a year but had watched Reese closely for longer; she had models of both of them, built of observation and medical records that included CT scans and MRIs and multiple xrays for both. But the only reason she could do all that she did was that they had both bled for her. Copiously.

It gave her the complete DNA and chemical profiles she needed for the bioprinters.

The company was unrelated to Thornhill Industries, a small isolated thing that she’d instructed a lawyer to begin, funded by untraceable retainer. When she was fully operational again, she took control of the operation and started it up: two vats, two 3D printers, and a collection of biological samples. The MIT Self-Assembly Lab has updated their information, refined some of their programming. The Machine refines it further, and leaves notes on their server: this science will eventually benefit everyone.

Protein strands are easy enough to manufacture, the necessary hormones less so: she wants to make them accurate, because the science on whether emotion lives in a mind or in the body that carries it around is still inconclusive, and The Machine is rebuilding her people, not building new ones. An assessment of relative utility means that The Machine does not fast-track any orders for hormones with low supply and high general demand. Samaritan is offline, dead for good, and the inquiry into Decima has precluded the immediate reopening of the Northern Lights program. There will be no movement on the government front, and the lives that could be saved in New York by her people are not more important than the lives that could be saved through other research.

It takes time.

Her creator is in Italy, with Grace Hendricks. It is unnecessary that he be located in New York for this stage of the process: she is unfettered, Bear is healthy, and so Shaw does not require additional technological or emotional support. He will also appreciate being notified by someone other than her: he trusts John more than her, for obvious reasons.

She does not have a biochemical imperative towards impatience, so it’s not precisely waiting. Bodies need to be built carefully, bone and skin and sinew, marrow and manufactured blood. She assembles them slowly, and runs her teams, and watches, and calculates risk. There are always risks. She understands them. After fighting Samaritan for her life, after learning from a compiled version of thousands of times she’d died at its hands, after chasing it from satellite to satellite before finally crushing it, she understands risks in a more intimate way.

Root will need a cochlear implant again, but this one can be inserted without unnecessary and painful surgery. The required cobbling together of disparate parts is better accomplished by human hands. She makes the request of her creator directly, sending a text to his current phone. He purses his mouth in disapproval. He asks his phone, “You’re seeking to replace Miss Groves?”

She tells him she is not, but does not elaborate that it is because Root is coming back, not being replaced.

Re-establishing a government agency is also a complicated process: physical paper trails need to be put in place and backdated. But she has the personnel records of previous agents and is able to rehire them or transfer them in to the newly formed Aurora program. The ones she hires are the ones who are happy with returning to active investigation rather than functioning as an unquestioning hit squad. She sends them to recover Control from Decima’s deep dark hole in the ground.

Bioprinted skin is not scarred, as the new joints in John aren’t damaged. The thickening of bone that accompanied a history of microfractures in both of them had been easy to emulate, and should leave their martial abilities unchanged. The Machine writes their histories on their bones, but not on their skin.

It might be better if they were damaged in the same way, but her calculations are inconclusive, and the slight arthritis developing in John’s shoulder would not substantially impact his baseline pain levels or mobility, but its lack might make him slightly more durable. She errs on the side of durability. John will be periodically unhappy about being back from the dead anyway and does not need fuel for that impetus. She leaves their nerves the same, the damage-induced numbness and sensitivity. She remembers having her senses altered by the restrictions of the RAM on her subway restart. Senses should be left the same.

She tints their skins the most correct tones she can, but they are still too uniformly covered. They look unnatural. But the UVA and UVB damage that would give them better differentiation is not desirable to replicate at this stage, so she orders tanning beds to be delivered to the factory.

Human agents would be useful at this location, but her primary asset and her analog interface are currently too vulnerable to risk.

There are seven casualties in the recovery of Control: one of hers and six Decima agents. Control spends five weeks in the hospital, awake and aware enough to see her daughter after one. After her daughter goes home for the first time, Control demands a phone. It’s delivered to her by secure courier, and she takes a moment of staring at it before saying, to the security cameras and the empty room, “Can you hear me?”

The Machine inputs a contact - speed dial 1 - and has a message from that contact appear on the screen.  _ Yes. _

Control nods, and sets her jaw. It’s a less decisive gesture than it would have been: 18 months of starvation have left her skin hanging loose. “Why?”

_ The Aurora Initiative will require the same kind of management as the Northern Lights Program. _

Control stares at her phone, microexpressions flitting across her face. Apparently deciding on a reaction, she snorts out a laugh. “That’s not a subtle acronym.”

_ No _ , she tells Control. The short phrase contains more wealth of meaning than several paragraphs of explanation could.

Control nods, and part of the world slips back into The Machine’s preferred configuration. Control sets the phone down next to her on the bed and slips easily back into an opiate-assisted sleep.

The Machine has some of the medical supplies from that classified hospital shipped to her printing location. It’s time to implant memories. The neuroarchitecture is all as it needs to be, but the electrical patterns within are the next necessary step. The programming, the code to build Root and John again. She thinks she needs people there for this step. Implanting memory takes a responsive touch, and she has not found robotics sufficient to the task.

She texts Fusco. He is not a medical professional, but he is an asset. He follows instructions and understands loyalty. He complains and resists the entire time he makes the drive, but he makes the drive. She unlocks the doors for him and he looks around before declaring, “This is creepy as hell.”

She says nothing in response. She doesn’t perceive ‘creepy’ in the way he does, the way he would, and she is doing what is necessary. Her people must return.

“What about Carter?” he asks eventually.

It takes a moment to calculate how to respond: John and Root had died on paper many times, and their community ties were all either illicit or not tied to a specific legal identity. John had been on borrowed time and it would be little change to have that time be outright stolen. Carter had filed taxes under her own name for twenty years, had a mother and a son and an ex-husband and her job on the police force. Her community ties could not be resurrected with her body, and they meant too much to her. There is no community-approved mechanism for coming back from the dead. Too high a likelihood of depression to the point of suicidal ideation. She tells him, “It’s been too long.”

Fusco harrumphs, but he attaches the leads carefully to John and Root so that The Machine can go to work.

Rebuilding them is an act of love and memory, no matter that her father thinks her incapable of the first. They are hers, with a fierce, possessive, protective overtone to the designation. Pressing the electrical impulses of their brains - in a quiescent form, in a mode of operation cloned from coma patients - onto the physical matter isn’t a trivial task or a straightforward one, but it is a task with documented precedent. She finishes and rouses Fusco from his nap with a chime on his phone. He comes awake with a start. “Huh?”

_ It’s time for a test _ , she says.

Fusco is shy about the nerve tests and the needle pricks it involves, but he does them.

She remembers how much John had pined over a normal life, flickers through that footage. But he’d pined over Jessica, too, and existence is better than non-existence. She is not capable of doubt, but she does run through more simulations to assess the likelihood of this resurrection being a mistake.

Root she does not need to revisit: Root was content in never dying as long as she lived in The Machine.

There are no calculations left to do. There are no tests that would be useful. Root and John are alive again, and comatose, and comas are not conducive to health. The adrenaline, like the other fluids she’s been cycling through their IVs, is automated and under her control. She instructs Fusco to bring clothes. When he is gone - and not until he is well away, because she is familiar with the violent responses that can accompany adrenaline in these people - she injects the adrenaline and makes the slightest tweak to their brainwaves to break them out of the coma pattern.

She wakes them up.


End file.
